"Wizards know their times," Bolingbroke assures Dame Eleanor,
in 2 Henry VI, as they prepare to conjure a Spirit from hell.

Deep night, dark night, the silent of the night,
The time when screech-owls cry, and bandogs howl,
And spirits walk, and ghosts break up their graves;
That time best fits the work we have in hand.

Less than a century later, in stunning contradiction, John Norris of
Bemerton's "Hymn to Darkness" (published 1687) serenely lauds
night as rapturous and benign, agent equally of highest holiness and poetic
inspiration.

But thee I now admire, thee would I chuse
For my Religion or my Muse.
Tis hard to tell whether thy reverend shade
Has more good Votaries or Poets made,
From thy dark caves were Inspirations given
And from thick groves went vows to Heaven.[1]

Norris is here celebrating (and consolidating) the emergence of a new
literary genre, the poetic nocturne: one intent on refiguring those cold,
dead and sunless hours feared by most of mankind over millennia into an
order of exquisite and numinous experience. The genre of poetic nocturne,
then, needs dating not to the eighteenth century and the verse of such
as Parnell, Young and Gray as has literary history hitherto, but to the
Renaissance: whose poetry, masques and painting, in revaluing night as
a time of beauty and profundity, overturn, I will argue, the construction
predominant in classical and medieval traditions. Those earlier approaches
themselves, Greek, Roman, biblical, patristic and medieval, have never
been systematically investigated for their representation of night. This
paper, accordingly, will seek to sketch a basic poetic tradition, and its
elevation to independent genre, hitherto uncharted: from whose Renaissance
productions eighteenth-century and Romantic writing will often derive,
and at whose heart lie Shakespeare, Jonson, and perhaps above all, the
lyric but combative genius of Milton.

The survey discovers a standard repertoire of nocturnal motifs, and
a quintessential ambivalence, which each maintain substantial continuity
across ancient and Christian literatures into the Renaissance, although
not without historical permutation. Fundamental shifts of emphasis are
to be expected, after all, since presentations of natural reality are not
mere reflections of deep-seated ecological values, even though some lines
may suggest so: dependence on light and fear of darkness, for instance,
well caught in Spenser's "Our life is day, but death with darknesse
doth begin," in The Faerie Queene, 3.4.59.9. Art's representations
derive, rather, from the mediation of such fundamentals through historical
social formations. "Natural" appearances, as I have suggested
elsewhere, and borrowing Reader-Response terminology, are in fact "read"
by mutable "interpretive communities," each with its distinct
"horizons of expectation," no less than are texts. Historical
communities, each with their own complex of working material relations
with nature, project upon the external world varied structures of attention,
"fresh priorities of need and desire, and attendant new fronts"
of visual acuity and familiarity in the manifold of landscapes.[2]
"Ecological" responses, in life and art, are thus filtered through
"nature-sensibilities" formed by social practices, class location
and literary convention.

"Night-walking" for instance is a crime for the medieval
commoner (a royal charter of 1347 granted Bristol the right to imprison
nightwalkers, for their motivation could only be felonous), but becomes
a pious and aesthetic convention for the well-to-do, urban scholar in the
century that invented the recreative stroll: as is evident from II Penseroso.
Again, we shall see how, in antiquity, sophisticated, metropolitan poets
of the Hellenistic and Roman imperial period pen an "aesthetic"
refiguring of night, along with other elemental experience, reworking mythological
themes within a poised, sceptical climate: precisely as Elizabethan and
Stuart writers will confect primitive medieval horrors with self-consciously
suave rational superiority into a field of delicate antiquarian whimsy.
With the decline of humanistic self-confidence in late antiquity, however,
a "vertical imagination" develops, majestically acclaiming the
starry spaces in derogation of this puny, sinful earth. When, with the
Renaissance, humanism is reborn, construction of night's meaning, moral
status and empiric appearances will in England be caught up in the ideological
collisions of that era, and articulated increasingly along adversarial
lines of "Puritan" and "courtly" discourse. It is,
perhaps, precisely in attempted transcendence of such sectarian division
that Norris' poem quoted above, seeks, like the philosophy of the Cambridge
Platonists with whom he was affiliated, to establish an eirenic, common
ground of sacramentality: one he attempts to locate in the mystery of holiness,
diffidently occult, encountered in nocturnal darkness.

The Vision of the Deity is made
More sweet and Beatifick by thy shade.
But we poor tenants of this Orb below
Don't here thy excellencies know,
Till Death our understandings does improve,
And then our Wiser ghosts thy silent night-walks love. [italics
mine]

Night-walking, then, once criminalised as a menace to social order,
may now prove a ground of its conciliative recovery.

Classical Traditions

The ancient Mediterranean peoples generally retired to bed soon after
sunset in order to rise with the sun. Street lighting seems not to have
been common, though we know some large cities (like Antioch) attempted
it in some measure. Terminating each day's life, and with an abruptness
unfamiliar to more northerly climes, night is consequently and very deeply
associated with death. In the Iliad, Apollo, arrows clanging on
his back as he drops from Olympus in fury to slaughter Danaans, is said
to fall "like the night." When the Trojans hem the Greeks against
their ships and Hector breaches their ramparts, to the terrified enemy
he bursts in "with a look like nightfall on his face."[3]

By logical extension, night is associated with the horror of the underworld,
Tartarus, and brings to mortals not only sleep but a twin-brother, Death:
siblings familiar long after to Renaissance philosophers and sculpted by
Michelangelo.[4] Along with death-like darkness,
night stands as the master-metaphor for a range of fears: she gave birth,
says Hesiod, to Pain and Deceit, Murder and Lawlessness, sad Age and Strife.
Further associations include demonology (the time of witches like Horace's
Canidia in Epode five or the cannibalistic Erictho of Lucan's Pharsalia
who "never appeared abroad in daylight and quitted the tombs only
on wet or cloudy nights, when she went to catch and bottle whatever lightning
happened to fall"), and criminality. Night is the time for thieves,
daylight for honesty, notes Euripides; and Horace concurs: "By nightime
sin, and cloak thy sin with clouds." The very stillness of the world
of night induces fear, states Valerius Flaccus.[5]
In Roman Republican poetry, virtually the only references to night come
in Tragedy, where it represents the condition of misfortune.[6]

Counterposing these four motifs of negative night -- criminality, demonology,
darkness, and night as a general figure of oppression -- are a number,
however, of positive motifs. In a society moving upon simple agricultural
rhythms, the failing of light means the ending of toil, the grateful homeward
trudge of dispersed workers and family. In a surviving fragment Sappho
praises Hesperus, the evening star, for "bringing back all things
which bright dawn scattered; you bring the sheep, you bring the goat, you
bring the child back to its mother." Praise of night as the hours
of comfort, in which the labourer bathes his limbs in the bliss of sleep,
will become standard to Roman evocation of the exemplary vetus colonus.
Moreover in Archaic Greece, whose nature-sensibility "read" natural
and human life as an essential continuum of energies, their processes interacting
and mutually articulating, sleep could be projected across nocturnal landscape
itself.

Asleep are the peaks and watercourses of the mountains,
the headlands and ravines, all creeping things which
the black earth feeds, wild beasts and the race of the
bees, and monsters in the depths of the dark sea; asleep
are the tribes of the broad-winged birds.[7]

In so unified a conception of the world, it is in metaphor that reality
is transcribed.

Respite from labour, sleep, peace: night's deep calm of health is so
deeply felt that nocturnal description may turn ironic backdrop to pain
and peril -- to precisely the qualities, parodoxically, that in the negative
topoi it had itself figured. In Sappho's lyrics, for instance, nocturnal
peace highlights the lonely anguish of the lovelorn:

Now she is preeminent among the Lydian women, as
when the sun has set, the rosy-fingered moon surpasses
all the stars. It throws its light over the salt sea, and
equally over the richly flowered fields. The lovely dew
falls, the roses bloom . . . And often she walks up and down
remembering gentle Atthis with desire in her tender heart,
and her soul is devoured by longing.

Objectifying the delicate rapture of the lover's feeling, such nocturne
simultaneously establishes the pitch of her suffering, by constituting
night as the order of natural harmony from which she is sleeplessly in
exile. Virgil likewise draws night as a paradise of health hushed in the
serenity of sleep from which lonely Dido is expelled.

It was night, and tired creatures all over the world
were enjoying kindly sleep. Forests and fierce seas were
at rest, as the circling constellations glided in their
midnight course. Every field, all the farm animals, and the
colourful birds were silent, all that lived across
miles of glassy mere and in the wild country's ragged
brakes, lying still, under the quiet night in a sleep which
smoothed each care away from hearts which had forgotten
life's toil. But not so the Phoenician queen . . . .

This passage is the direct inspiration of sonnets by Petrarch and Surrey,
a millennium and a half later.[8] The genius of
Homer merges both traditions of feeling, night as a state of siege and
as a bliss of suspended animation, in a single dazzling simile closing
book eight of the Iliad:

There are nights when the upper air is windless and
the stars in heaven stand out in their full splendour
round the bright moon; when every mountain-top, headland
and ravine starts into sight, as the infinite depths of
the sky are torn open to the very firmament; when every
star is seen, and the shepherd rejoices. Such and so many
were the Trojans' fires, twinkling in front of Ilium midway
between the ships and the streams of Xanthus.

The ambiguity which Homer masterfully constructs here, windless nocturnal
peace fused with rousing, abnormal brilliance, connects just the ambivalence
we have seen toward night, with the conflicting feelings of the combatants:
grateful for calm and respite, they are also pierced by a drama sharp upon
the nerves.

Kindred in tone to this state of enchanted expectation is the association
of night with deep mystery, and with a certain religious emotion. The Muses
go by night to hymn the supreme gods, declares Hesiod in the Theogony
(10). Dionysus explains to Pentheus in the Bacchae (485) that by
night the Maenads celebrate, since darkness promotes religious awe. Mystic
rites, echoes Horace, four hundred years later, are to be performed in
night's deep silence (Epode 5, 49-52).

A cluster of positive motifs, then -- night as signifying respite from
toil, the luxury of sleep, an order of peace often the foil to lovers'
woe, and the occasion of religious rite or vision -- proves stable and
recurrent in classical literature from Archaic Greece to Rome. With Hellenistic
Greece and early imperial Rome, however, a very new cultural climate has
transformed relations with nature, and with them, established both the
primacy of "positive" night and an altered field of nocturnal
tones. Briefly and very generally, as is inescapable in an overview, one
may say that the nature-sensibility of Archaic Greece, in which "amechania"
or the sense of helplessness in a world of uncontrollable and mysterious
natural forces left deep impress on literature, gave way in the Classical
period to the confidence of an emergent scientific rationalism, which diminished
nature from a volatile, semi-animate ocean of forces to "physis":
a finite corpus of laws open to human apprehension and control. The catastrophic
end of the Peloponnesian wars gave a final blow to the Archaic concept
of the coherence of the physical and moral worlds, so that with the rise
of the intensely urban Hellenistic civilisation and of a certain technological
mastery of nature, the earth dwindled into the "countryside":
a welcome complement to human life and a pristine space of metropolitan
recreation.[9] The temper of the cultivated class
was now intensely sceptical: "Determined efforts were made to define
the gods in terms acceptable to men who were basically sceptical about
their existence."[10] Demystifying mythology
as simply a sublimation of long-past mortal action and character, the Greek
philosopher Euhemerus became a classical equivalent of the best-seller;
Juvenal would observe in his second satire that not even children believed
in Hades any more. What we might call "post-mythic night" was
now crafted, in veins of elegance and soft primitivism, by "neoteroi,"
the same "revolutionizing" poets who introduced pastoral verse
and materialist landscape description. These three novelties, I suggest,
are cognate epistemic and poetic developments: each the product of urban
rationalism's confident, secular and sentimentalising nostalgia for the
elemental.

Pastoral verse, developed by Theocritus and Virgil for sophisticated
courts, portrayed rustic scenes with an artful and artificial affection.
Virgil's Eclogues (1, 2, 6, 10) establish a conventional nightfall
close for pastoral that will be echoed over millennia (still found in Spenser's
Shepherd's Calendar, for instance, and Milton's Lycidas):
they concretize the old theme of gratitude for concluded labour in poignant
homely images of lengthening mountain shadows, returning oxen, the folding
of flocks and smoke rising from cottage chimneys. Panofsky finely notes
the new tone here, observing that Virgil's evenings settle silently "in
that vespertinal mixture of sadness and tranquillity which is perhaps Virgil's
most personal contribution to poetry."[11]
Evening in the Georgics is likewise mellow and unthreatening, a
new music of humanism: sunset brings welcome cool, the evening star dew,
and the moon rises quietly over shores whose copses ring with the notes
of kingfisher and finches (3.336-38).

Moon and stars had traditionally enjoyed significance in antiquity
as markers of annual time. In Homer's era, the period of the full moon
was a time for festivals; with the first full moon of the summer solstice
came the Olympian Games; and a full moon was long considered an auspicious
time for marriages. Calendar verse such as Hesiod's Works and Days
and treatises on agriculture by Cato and Varro timed their tasks by the
rising and setting of stars and constellations rather than by the months
of the calendar, which could never be precisely counted upon. But with
the "aestheticising" culture of poets like Apollonius Rhodios,
busily developing landscape description and imitating the celebrated delicacy
of chiaroscuro effects by painters like Antipholus, moonlight touches
came to service a vogue for the exquisite. Hylas is pulled to his death
by a naiad when she sees him suddenly transformed into a radiant image
by the full moon shining from a cloudless sky. As Jason hugs his golden
fleece, its shimmer throws a glow on his cheeks and forehead, and he rejoices
as a girl who catches sudden moonlight on her silken gown in her lonely
attic. Virgil evokes moonlight dancing on a rippling sea; and the thoughts
of his Aeneas leap like the flash of a moon's rays from water swaying in
a basin. Such fastidious nocturnal optics contrast sharply with a certain
traditional insouciance: Homer, for instance, had conceived the Palace
of Alcinous as lit by a radiance "like that of the sun or the moon"[12]
[italics mine]. From a Hellenistic poet, such indiscrimination would have
been taken as barbarous.

The new nocturne of the urbanely poised finds particular frisson in
night's old occult deeps. Mis-en-scène of magic and theophany, night
is the medium by which Tiber makes his momentous appearance to Aeneas.
Theocritus' Simaetha casts a sinister folk-spell on her faithless lover
by the light of the moon, while the barking of dogs tells of Hecate's approach.
Ovid's Medea, up to similar business, apostrophises likewise night, stars
and Hecate, and supplies an occasion for extended description.

All alone she wandered out into the deep stillness
of midnight. Men, birds and beasts were sunk in profound
repose; there was no sound in the hedgerows; the leaves
hung mute and motionless; the dewy air was still. Only
the stars twinkled. Stretching up her arms to these, she
turned thrice about, thrice sprinkled water . . . and thrice
gave tongue in wailing cries. [13]

The scepticism underlying such agreeable baroque, along with the Trimalchian
nightlife of the great Roman courts, freed empiric nocturnal definition
for the new positive motif of night as carousing time. Theocritus' lads
come drunkenly visiting lasses by torchlight, and mystic Dionysus is shrunk
by bibulous Rome to "jolly Bacchus" and a riotous crew of nymphs
and satyrs.[14]This "night-haunting
god," in Seneca's phrase (Oedipus 490), presides over a colourfully
festive night that the Renaissance eventually revived; one whose eroticism
moreover established with Ovid one further new motif of great future currency:
the aubade. Ovid's lament of stealthy lovers over night's cruel
brevity would be greatly elaborated from a few lines in the Amores
(1.13.110-19) by such master-poets as Chaucer and Donne.[15]

Finally, in late antiquity, influenced by a sense, in Dodds' words,
of "the progressive withdrawal of divinity from the material world,"[16]
Christianity and many pagan religions alike reconceived night yet again.
Orphism exposited night as holy to the supreme deity of secret wisdom,
the universal first cause, hidden in blackness and to be worshiped only
in the sanctity of silence. Christianity's contemptus mundi similarly
exalted the night as revealing to humanity the celestial landscape of the
heavens, contrasting dark sublunar misery with God's stupendous cosmic
frame and brilliant luminaries. Monastic tradition was to admire moonlight
not for its scenic effects but because the moon symbolized the highest
mysteries. Late Stoicism's worship of the stars combined with a widely
shared reverence for astrology. Plato, Seneca and Boethius, among others,
bequeathed Christianity superb passages on the mighty spaces above our
heads, the splendid and religious order of the starry heavens. In this
climate, the emperor Julian records his ecstasy in walking in starlight
as a stimulus that helped convert him to paganism, whilst for Christians
God became ,
the "Most High."[17] As such, it became
possible for the question whether day or night is better, to develop as
a standard debating topic in medieval universities. Centuries later, Cambridge
would require Milton to adopt a stance on this for his first Prolusion.

As the Roman empire broke gradually apart, however, amid escalating
demonological and barbarian terrors, night's overwhelmingly predominant
meaning in the common imagination was active as a time of ghosts, witches
and assault, the realm of Lucifer, Prince of Darkness. As an advanced commercial
and rational civilisation relapsed into the archaic political economy of
agrarian regionalism, Christian culture resumed the intensely negative
construction of night produced in early, agrarian Greece.

Biblical and Medieval Traditions

Biblical tradition supplied the same deeply negative assessment of
the hours of darkness, although within the familiar ambivalence of sharply
subordinate positive motifs. "A servant earnestly desires the shadow"
notes Job 7.2, mindful of the evening respite from toil for which
Psalm 104.23 also gives thanks; as does Ambrose in a hymn which
comforts Augustine in The Confessions (9.12). Canticles sings
of night as the time of holy love, praising the fairness of the moon (4.2,
6.10). Night is the time of divine visitation or the granting of religious
wisdom: for "night unto night sheweth knowledge" (Psalm
19.2). "When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers"
meditates the Psalmist, with dramatic eloquence, "The moon and the
stars, which thou hast ordained; / What is man that thou art mindful of
him?" (Psalm 8.3-4).[18] But the
fear of evening and nightfall is frequently expressed:[19]
they may bring "the thief in the night" (1 Thessalonians
5.2) or worse, divine retribution as in Job 36.20. Worst of all,
by night was Christ betrayed by Judas; night thus connotes the distinct
agonies of hell (eternal darkness) and of Gethsemane.

Predictably, Anglo-Saxon culture, agrarian, war-swept and melancholy,
is haunted by nightfear. In Beowulf, Grendel is characterised as
"greatest of night-evils" ("niht-bealwa maest"). He
glides, we are twice told, toward Heorot for slaughterous spree with the
onset of night. In "The Dream of the Rood," it is with nightfall
that the Christ-Earl's corpse is lamented over, his thanes "earme
on þa æfentide" ("wretched in the evening").[20]

Indeed virtually no-one, it seems (with the exception of Virgil), was
ever able prior to the Renaissance to enjoy the onset of evening for its
physical reality. In Middle English, whilst "este" could mean
"pleasant" as well as "east," "weste" meant
not only "west" but "desolate" (see ll. 999-1000 of
The Owl and the Nightingale.) The Greeks and Romans had never been
moved to imagine and revere a goddess of eve, to match Aurora goddess of
dawn. They looked forward only, and eagerly, to Vesper, the evening star,
restorative of perished light. Indeed tellingly in the Iliad, it
had been Achilles' spearpoint, searching out Hector's flesh in their terminal
combat, that was said to scintillate like the evening star: the last, literally
poignant point of light before the great engulfing blackness. It took,
as Aretino[21] confessed, Titian's genius for
colour for poets to "discover" the sunset: classical and medieval
sunsets were purely mythological, the horses of the sun plunging inexorably
into the Western waters. The sole, mild exception known to me lies in a
lyric of Stesichorus, which has the sun descend into the "golden bowl"
of the ocean. In the Silvae (2.2.47-48), Statius had praised a certain
villa for boasting rooms that could view both sunrise and sunset; yet even
he presented the latter merely as lengthening (Virgilian) shadows, not
in colourific terms. Rosy light is reserved for dawn. In English, the earliest
coloured sunset I have been able to discover is by Gavin Douglas, (circa
1513), in lines 12-15 of his prologue to book 13 of his translation of
the Aeneid: where the sun "byrnand red" in the evening
sky as "The son enfyrit haill": an observation opening an astonishingly
anamalous evocation of nocturnal beauty. Shakespeare's "Light thickens;
and the crow / Makes wing to th'rooky wood; / Good things of Day begin
to droop and drowse, / While Night's black agents to their preys do rouse"
represents the characteristic vespertinal unease.[22]

Curfew was imposed in most medieval towns, while in the country, "with
hearths smothered for fear of fire . . . the night was spent in a state
of physical and mental siege."[23] The Middle
Ages well understood why the Bible, in Canticles 3.8 and Psalm
91.5, had spoken evocatively of the terror that grips by night.

Only evil things travel by night, as the Nightingale tartly reminds
the Owl; and a "nightwalker" was one who roamed at night for
criminal purposes: like Grendel, defined as a "sceadu-genga."
Shakespeare's Falstaff and Autolycus thus make merry of their profession
as "Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade" who as "The
pale moon shines by night . . . wander here and there"; and "night-walking"
is used as a term for thieving or possibly prostitution in Richard III.[24]
By night Tarquin rapes Lucrece, when "pure thoughts are dead and still."

"Night-spells" or popular charms were recited at doors and
windows at nightfall as protection against harm from "elves or wights,"
as glimpsed in Chaucer's "Miller's Tale" (3480-860) and E.K.'s
gloss on Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar (to "March" line
54). In the streets outside, the night watch was sometimes expressly prohibited
by medieval guilds from trying to summon ghosts. As late as the 16th and
17th centuries, peasant agrarian cults in backward areas of Italy, Switzerland
and Germany were still dispatching vigilante "benandanti" or
"good" nightwalkers, (perhaps in dreams or cataleptic states),
to confront assumed witches in symbolic nocturnal battles four times a
year.[25]

Conventional complaints against night recur in The Faerie Queene
(3.4.55-58) and The Rape of Lucrece (764-805); Sidney and Spenser
are still cataloguing the customary physical and ghoulish ills in Astrophil
and Stella (sonnet 96) and Epithalamion: "Let not the shriech
oule, nor the storke be heard: / Nor the night Raven that stil deadly yels,
/ Nor damned ghosts cald up with mighty spels, / Nor griesly vultures make
us once afeard . . ." (stanza 19). The topos of ugly creatures and
howling spirits is widely current (similar passages occur for instance
in Marston and Ascham); and the tradition of night as kingdom of the damned
finds its way as a lurid melodrama of blasted trees and fitfully lit graves
even into the painting of so normally placid an artist as Jacob van Ruisdael,
in his seventeenth century Jewish Cemetary.

In summary, we can see that the Renaissance inherited from biblical
and medieval traditions a mixed lineage, but one overwhelmingly weighted
toward the negative. "When any poet would describe a horrible tragic
accident," notes Thomas Nashe, "to add the more probability and
credence unto it, he dismally beginneth to tell how it was dark night when
it was done and cheerful daylight had quite abandoned the firmament . .
. Well have the poets termed night the nurse of cares, the mother of despair,
the daughter of hell."[26]

Renaissance Revaluations

Yet in the English Renaissance, heavily influenced as we shall see
by Italian and Dutch pictorialism, night also and paradoxically soared
to a cult status of bewitching beauty. Surrey, following the example of
Petrarch (Rime 164) lovingly reworked Virgil's nocturnal setting
for lovesick Dido as the basis for a still and delicate sonnet ("Alas,
so all things now do hold their peace"). And from the 1590s we find
ravishing syllables on starlight entrancement thronging Shakespeare's plays,
for instance, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice
and Romeo and Juliet.

Moreover, night now developed, I think, an independent poetical form
of her own: a tradition became a cult, and a topos a genre. From the repertoire
of diverse classical, biblical and medieval night themes, hitherto scattered
across narratives and lyric poems as subordinate motifs, Milton's Il
Penseroso, Vaughan's "The Night" and Norris' "Hymn to
Darkness" cull motifs of peace, contemplation, mortality and serene
celestial bodies, and consolidate them into the earliest instances in English
of "nocturne" as a self-substantial genre.[27]

To accommodate the enthusiasm, new generic terms were devised. According
to the OED, Donne's poem "A Nocturnall upon St. Lucies Day" is
the first to use the word "nocturnal" as a proper noun (deriving
perhaps from the "nocturne," late Latin and French, which had
been one of the divisions of the office of matins. The adjective "nocturnall"
usually meant simply "pertaining to the night," and is dated
to Caxton and 1485). Likewise, Herrick's "Night-piece, to Julia"
in The Hesperides (1648) is the first recorded use of the term "night-piece"
as a title of a literary composition. Ben Jonson had first coined the term
"night-piece" in 1605 to refer to a painting of night scenery,
produced by Inigo Jones for the Queen's Masque of Blacknesse; and
Vaughan in Silex Scintillans II (published 1655) compares the melancholy
beauty of a friend's recollected death with viewing "some meek night-piece."

Medieval people had never so much enjoyed the living world of the senses
as to be fascinated by its mysterious nocturnal transformation, its irregular
play of moonlight and suggestive atmospherics; they -- if virtuous -- simply
slept through it, taking their "hailsum nychtis rest." The change
of attitude, we shall see, owes much to the emergence of a new metropolitan,
sceptical and rationalising culture in London and at court; and I would
argue that a broad cultural parallel with Hellenistic and Roman antiquity
can clearly be established here. "Post-mythic night" once more
purveys archaic mythological character and motif with delicate ingenuity,
recasting an earlier world of the elemental and fearful as a field of ornamental
archaism. Vogue for the "romancey" and exquisite, haunts both
paintings and literary fairy-land: Herrick, for instance, conceives Oberon's
grove as "tinseld with Twilight" and Queen Mab as "moon-tann'd,"
while Drayton subjects the casting of midnight spells to parody as Mab
trysts with the handsome fairy Pigwiggen.[28]

Even the character of night melancholy sweetens with the seventeenth
century. For Chapman, her "palace" had been of "black shades
and desolations," but Milton files her habitat as "trim gardens"
and "glimmering bowers."[29] As Il
Penseroso saunters among oaks to observe the riding moon, reminiscing
of Greek drama and medieval knight-errantry, his educated calm is that
of a Stuart citizen unthreatened by god or ogre, wolf or bear. The night-watchman,
he knows, will "bless the doors from nightly harm," and he may
thus continue his safe and sophisticated reverie "till civil-suited
Morn appear" and he re-enter the un-romancey sceptical metropolis.[30]

Three lines of influence promoting Renaissance poetic nocturne are,
I think, the cultural prestige of pictorial breakthroughs in painting night
scenery; developments in mystical thought; and the fashionable cult of
solitary melancholy.

Pictorialism and the New Empiricism

With the sixteenth century, European painting could boast bravura studies
of night-time chiaroscuro, and their tone was tender. Panofsky categorises
a three-part evolution in naturalism, from the "nocturne negative"
(pictures giving the effect of night through the omission of colour, like
the "Betrayal" and the "Crucifixion" in the Limbourgs'
Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berri); through the intermediate stage
of the "nocturne positive" (where night is suggested through
colours different from those of day); to the complete optical authenticity
of the "nocturne absolute": for example Geertgen tot Sint Jan's
Nativity.[31]

The mysterious interim dubiety of dusk had exercised since the late
middle ages a comparable emotive and symbolic interest as a zone of transition:
both for painters, like the Boucicaut Master, who shows St. Denis martyred
before a twilight Paris, and for the Pearl-poet, who in these half-lit
minutes witnessed the procession of maidens being led by the Lamb into
the Holy City (Pearl 1093-96). But in the sixteenth century, night
itself could focus religious piety and aesthetic delight. In Venice, the
poetical scene which artists called "un notte" provided regular
income for a new breed of moonlight specialists. To the north, El Greco's
Christ on the Mount of Olives caught a thrilling, gloomy piety,
of just the sort inspired in Sidney's Arcadia by Philoclea's moonlit
grove, that "might breede a fearful kind of devotion to look upon
it."

For a radical example of the new pictorial night-piece, its chiaroscuro
virtuosity propelling sacred moments from dawn back into the darkness,
one may contrast versions of The Agony in the Garden. Mantegna's
version presents a daylit, morning scene, and Bellini's too is clearly
lighted, its spiritual suggestion located in the distant white brilliance
of Jerusalem at dawn. But some sixty years later, in 1510, the Netherlandish
painter Gossaert floods Gethsemane with sacramental moonlight, from a subtly
and radiantly naturalistic sky. For another instance of the baptism of
night, its conversion from terror to the softer ways of Christianity, one
can contrast the fourteenth-century nocturne of Simone Martini, depicting
Guidoriccio da Fogliano, with the uses of night of Titian and Tintoretto.
The former shows the condottierre crossing on horseback a deserted,
barren, nightbound landscape, featuring two towns captured by him for Siena
and the tents of his encamped army. One town is shown as circled by a dreadful
palisade of javelins, and the bare lunar terrain appears to represent the
fearful might, the martial terribilità, of the warlord of
Siena. Stars are omitted, but horse and rider in their proud trappings
are harsh with light. One might compare this psychology of night, as fit
setting for the irresistible conqueror, with Tamburlaine, switching his
colours to black at the third stage of his sieges. By contrast is Titian's
early sixteenth-century St. Jerome, the old saint rapt in the light of
a moon rising directly behind a tree, that touches the woodland scene with
a silvery-green and "endows the canvas with an ineffable sense of
the fantastic." The conception is evidently in the classical tradition
of the visionary night. Bernardo Tasso, commenting on the painting soon
after its completion, wrote "Never . . . did heaven see a more tranquil
and serene night; beneath its wing silence bore sweet sleep to the animals,
and the shadowed horrors, fearing the light of the beautiful night, stayed
concealed within the savage grottoes, and did not wander forth, but only
the pilgrim summer breezes played about the slopes and shores.[32]

In seventeenth-century England, it is hard to know what night paintings
were like, though they were certainly popular. In a table compiled from
auction catalogues in the Restoration, almost one in ten was listed as
a "moonlight piece" or a "night piece." H.V.S. Ogden,
the foremost authority on English landscape paintings of the period, suggests
that they probably resembled those of Aert van der Neer (1603-73) who was
famed as the Dutch moonlight specialist, and whose work displayed lunar
light on calm river scenes, and variously lit sky and cloud. Two nocturnes
that we do know of in the seventeenth-century collections, copies of pictures
by Rubens and Elsheimer, are likewise images of serenity and repose, with
soft lighting over open countryside, and devoid of human figures. Davenant's
instructions for the designs of Luminalia, the Stuart masque of
1638, specify an open landscape with a calme River, that tooke the shadowes
of the Trees by the light of the moon." Inigo Jones directly imitated
Elsheimer's Flight into Egypt for Luminalia's scenery, in
the full moon standing over a woodland lake.[33]

This ready symbol shone not only from painting to painting, but from
poem to poem: in The Shepherd's Calendar, A Midsummer Night's
Dream and The Winter's Tale, for example, Phoebe beholds "Her
silver visage in the wat'ry glass." There was good reason for this.
Description of night scenery had developed with difficulty in literature,
just as it had in art. Landscape painters had been handicapped by the lack
of guidance here from their usual and deeply normative sources: there existed
no inventory of nocturnal features in classical painting theory (in Vitruvius
and Pliny), and there was but slight precedent in Calendar traditions.
(The deficiency may actually have helped prompt the innovation: Renaissance
pioneers in the rebirth of pictorial space may have revelled in the opportunity
here to outgo the ancients in the dimostratione of a further encapsulation
of natural reality upon canvas). For poets, literary traditions had proven
equally unhelpful. In the conventional nightfall close to the Virgilian
eclogue, chronographia made only terse allusions to lengthening
shadows and the evening star; the Aeneid references to moonlight seem to
have been ignored by medieval writers. Even the troubadours, in their lyric
verse of sleepless yearning and illicit nocturnal amour, do not
present the night-time beyond an occasional one word reference to the nightingale.
Moonlight does not enter the verse of the troubadours and trouveres, and
I find only a single, cryptic reference to the existence of stars in Goldin's
five hundred page anthology. Late medieval and early Renaissance evocations
of night were generally mythological rather than descriptive, making reference
to black wings, sable mantles, or more majestically in Marlowe, to a rising
head:

The air with sparks of living fire was spangled,
And Night, deep-drenched in misty Acheron,
Heaved up her head, and half the world upon
Breathed darkness forth.[34]

For descriptions of night landscape to emerge in English literature,
they had to demystify the centuries-old tradition by which exaltations
of the night (including the seminal Genesis 1.16-18) had always flattered
her through a paradoxical stress on her brightness.

Now the Ocean Tytan quencht his flame,
And summoned Cynthya to set up her light,
The heavens with their glorious starry frame,
Preparde to crowne the sable-vayled night.

Regular identifications of Queen Elizabeth with Cynthia of course intensified
this approach: "Thou that mak'st a day of night, / Goddess excellently
bright" warbled Jonson. Yet in the late sixteenth and earlier seventeenth
centuries, night was complimented on all those swaying shadows previously
indispensable to felons, murderers and suicides. "Sweet umbrage"
sighs John Norris of night's "dark Caves."[35]
After a millennium and a half, there are now indications that below the
inevitable moon and stars exists, not damp vacancy and owls, but a fascinating
landscape. This provision of landscape evocation in positive nocturnal
writing is of considerable novelty. It is this topographic restitution
that defines, I feel, the transforming transition from conventional impresa
to promenade, from recited catalogue of nightingale, stars and moon, to
"pictorial" provision of spatial relations. It is precisely in
the seventeenth century that, according to the OED, the word "stroll"
is first recorded, to mean an indirected, recreative walk.

Il Penseroso proceeds from "glimmering bowrs and glades,"
through woodland, to the "accustomed oak." above which Cynthia
checks her dragon yoke. "And missing thee, I walk unseen / On the
dry smooth-shaven green." The Thoughtful Man has to raise his head
to notice the moon overhead, "Oft, as if her head she bowed / Stooping
through a fleecy cloud," as he continues engrossed onward through
the lower world:

Oft on a plot of rising ground
I hear the far-off curfew sound
Over some wide-watered shore
Swinging slow with sullen roar. (65-66, 71-72, 73-76)

The eye travels downward, among satisfactions that are sublunar. Lorenzo's
romantic eye is scenic: "How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this
bank!" "The moon shines bright. In such a night as this,
/ When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees, / And they did
make no noise . . ." [italics mine]. The period abounds in evidence
of a new and empiric descriptive particularity. If Fulke Greville can only
remark, traditionally, how "In Night . . . colours all to blacke are
cast, / Distinction lost," Spenser notes that "starry light /
. . . sparckling on the starry waves, does seem more bright." If Habington,
affirming in an ancient tradition that the stars' eternalism confutes mortal
pride in brief achievement, invokes them only derivatively as "rich
. . . jewels hung, that night / Doth like an Aethiop bride appeare"
(apparently with Romeo in mind), Cotton, in a splendid burst of demystification,
will accurately debunk the entire tradition:

No Ray of Light the Heart to cheer,
But little twinkling Stars appear;
Which like faint dying embers ly,
Fit nor to work, nor travel by.

Perhaps to him they Torches are,
Who guides Night's sovreign's drowsy Car,
And him they may befriend so near,
But us they neither light, nor cheer.

William Browne expands magnificently, with the help of a hint from Ovid,
the old topic of night's desertedness and silence:

All the upper world lay in a trance.
Only the curled streams soft chidings kept;
Dry summer's dust, in fearful whisp'rings stirr'd,
As loath to waken any singing bird.

This new detailed materiality in portrayal of the night is to be borrowed
by the Countess of Winchelsea for her chronographia in the "Nocturnal
Reverie," and by Keats, in "Hyperion."

The rapture in stellar brightness, in "spangled starlight sheen"
extends and develops through the seventeenth century. Vaughan and Herbert
observe their light with Galilean closeness. Vaughan addresses his star:

Elsewhere he records starlit dusk over a nocturne painted across the
ceiling of a tavern:

. . . that blue space below
Is fired with many stars; mark how they break
In silent glances o'er the hills, and speak
The evening to the plains; where shot from far,
They meet in dumb salutes, as one great star.

The feeling is particularly strong in Vaughan's verse, which finds "the
dark was gay, / And gilt with stars, more trim than day," and perhaps
reflects his Hermeticist assurance of constant commerce between skies and
earth, of earth's inseparable involvement in the physical circuit of spiritual
energy through the universe. But the recovery of the sublunar zone at night
extends, as we have seen, to much in contemporary poetry. This new nocturnal
"bridall of the earth and sky," this supplementation of the vertical
imagination by a horizontal one, had been expressed in an early state of
ambivalence in The Merchant of Venice. There in a single passage
glows the sense of heaven's rays on earth -- "How sweet the moonlight
sleeps upon this bank" -- together with the sterner medieval stratification,
the subordination of our little world:

There's not the smallest globe which thou beholdest
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-ey'd cherubims;
Such harmony is in immortal souls,
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

The focus here is precisely midway between, on the one hand, the vertical
aspiration, the old ascetic flight from black earth to the transcendent
brightness of the immutable spheres, and on the other, the eighteenth-century
and Romantic verse, (influenced by Il Penseroso), with their "terrestrialised"
starscapes, where the night-sky figures as backdrop to country walks and
meditations. The dual focus of this transitional phase is the poignant
framework of Vaughan's earthbound twilight:

They are all gone into the world of light!
And I alone sit longing here;
Their very memory is clear and bright,
And my sad thoughts doth clear.
It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast
Like stars upon some gloomy grove,
Or those faint beams in which this hill is dressed
After the sun's remove.[37]

The new delight in chiaroscuro landscape had perhaps sensitised Milton
to a nicety of discrimination between nocturnal dimness and nocturnal shadow:
the brothers in Comus complain of "double night of darkness,
and of shades."[38] Indeed only dunderheads
failed to appreciate the inimitable quality of filmy moonlight, and paid
out unguardedly the old-style compliments. Here lay the special hilarity
of Starveling stumping onstage as Moonshine; and from this derived the
impetus behind

Sweet moon, I thank thee for thy sunny beams;
I thank thee, Moon, for shining now so bright;
For by thy gracious, golden, glittering beams,
I trust to take of truest Thisbe sight.

The Elizabethan eye, however, demands a new term: and from Shakespeare
onwards we read of the moon's "sheen," a new Elizabethan word,
emerging to denote the lustre of a body reflecting light. The seventeenth
century imports from the Dutch the compound "night-light" to
denote the faint light perceptible during the hours of darkness: furnishing
thereby an English term for an imported cultural perception.[39]

Mysticism and Melancholy

Complementary to the novel pleasure in the distinctive visual conditions
of the small hours was the mystical revaluation of night's significance.
Night had long been "the mother of counsels." Following the biblical
and classical traditions we examined of "inspired night," Erasmus'
Adagia records "In nocte consilium," Jonson's Timber
echoes "Dat nox consilium," and Habington pens an apostrophe
to night entitled "Nox nocti indicat scientiam." Chapman's Shadow
of the Night, Milton's Il Penseroso, and Vaughan's "The
Night" go further, and revitalise the traditional Christian paradoxes
of Dionysus the Areopagite: the "tenebre in bono" reflections.
Physical darkness opens the intellectual eyes. "There is in God (some
say)," writes Vaughan "A deep but dazzling darkness": a
conceit strikingly close to Milton's line on the Godhead: "Dark with
excessive bright thy skirts appear."

Equally important is the new mystical melancholy. Without the Neoplatonic
revival of the Saturnian genius, who derives contemplative inspiration
from the twilight of groves and nocturnal seclusion, we would not, suggests
Lawrence Babb, have had Il Penseroso. And this character's medical
humour, "his atrabilious" genius, was itself, of course, a conception
born with the Renaissance. The Saturnian vogue helped legitimate the sweeter,
introspective seventeenth-century melancholy, "a certain tender and
pensive sadness" as Leishman calls it, which pervades Fletcher's song
from The Nice Valour, early in the century:

Ther's nought in this Life sweet,
If man were wise to see't,
But onely Melancholy,
O sweetest Melancholy.
Fountaine heads, and pathlesse Groves,
Places which pale passion loves:
Moon-light walkes, when all the fowles
Are warmly hous's, save Bats and Owles.[40]

Likewise Margaret Cavendish, who in 1656 declares she is "more
inclining to be melancholy than merry, but not crabbed or peevishly melancholy,
but soft melting solitary, and contemplating melancholy," enjoys a
"sad, and solemne verse . . . As Pensil'd Pictures drawne present
the Night, / Whose Darker Shadowes give the Eye delight."

These factors, then -- the evocation of nocturnal earthly scenery,
and the new dulcified and mystical melancholy -- clearly mark off the later
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century apprehension of night from that of the
Pearl-poet, of Chaucer, and of the medieval serenade. And the cardinal
point is to be found in Milton's first Prolusion, on whether day
or night is better. Orating against the primacy of night (perhaps in satiric
revolt against the prevailing vogue), he affirms: "Night is but the
passing and the death of Day." Night lacks self-identity: moonlight
and starlight are borrowed, he says, from the sun; and sleep is but "the
image and semblance of death . . . sleep is not a thing so precious that
Night deserves honour for the bestowal of it." Night is merely a void,
a privation of the real world of action. Such had been exactly the medieval
attitude: hence the traditional theme of "theft-guilty night,"
which steals hours from the short span of mortals, a theme which still
recurs in Browne and Davenant. And hence the botched conceits of A Midsummer
Night's Dream's artisans, once again a reverse index to the new sensibility:

The nocturnal revolution lies precisely in the fact that night now does
have her own distinctive psyche. The luxuriation in half-light, the nocturnal
stroll, and the contemplative melancholy, have objectified night as otium,
beyond the hiatus of sleep. Indeed night now exists practically as a respectable
negotium, with her religious observations and devotions, in sharp
contrast to the medieval noctivagants, who were never more than criminals,
guilty lovers, or poor travellers led astray (such as we still meet in
Comus and Marvell's "Mower to the Glowworms"). No longer
the conjuror simply of sleep and planets, she offers to the Stuart citizen
almost a social programme.

Night is promoted, in fact, to a fertile condition of ambiguity. "I
muse, which shows more love, / The day or night," wonders Herbert's
"Even-Song." With the new interpretative elasticity of the Renaissance,
nocturnes may ornament a wealth of inspirations -- beauty, purity, peace,
secrecy, malice, guilt, frenzy, rapture -- and her poets requisition all
ambiguities. Sidney plays off optics against convention to fine ironic
effect in sonnet 31, diagnosing in the chaste moon the tell-tale signs
of a frustrated lover; only to reintroduce her in a later sonnet (97) as
the laughing rallier of the love-sick. A Midsummer Night's Dream
similarly exploits the divided influences of Luna for both chastity and
fertility (as befits a nuptial drama).

Night's occult associations may be newly holy, along mystic and cabalist
lines, or damned as ever, in witches, ghosts and demons. There are sinister
shadows[42] to counterpose the glimmering exquisites
in the fairyland of Puck and Titania; and melancholias abound to suit every
temperament, ascetic or romantic, prophetic or malcontent. Shakespeare
conjures both the criminal and the amorous motifs with equal power: "How
silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night," thinks Romeo, "Like
softest music to attending ears" (2.2.15-65); and Lady Macbeth's invocation
"Come, thick night, / And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell /
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes" (1.5.50-52) is polarised
by Juliet's tender invocation of "love-performing night":

"Come, civil night,
Thou sober-suited matron, all in black
And learn me how to lose a winning match
. . .
Come, gentle night, come loving, black-browed night,
Give me my Romeo; and when I shall die
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun." (3.2.5, 10-12, 20-25).

Genre and Politics

It was within this pluralism of portraitures that night became politicised.
Two lines of nocturne developed, I think, one tending to mystical focus,
another to fairyland and the amorous; one dominant among cavalier writers,
and the other having Puritan affinities. It may even be that the fairy
topos popularised by Shakespeare in the Dream, and the melancholic
one distinguished by Milton, were not choices in ornament but political
shibboleths.

In the England of Elizabeth, a group of noblemen scientists centred
around Raleigh were pursuing "the deepe search of knowledge"
among the language of the mysteries, when the rising tide of feeling against
them prompted Chapman's extraordinary Shadow of the Night. The poem
displays "to purest eyes / With ease, the bowells of these misteries."
The night was, as we have seen, the time of Orphic and Hermetic holiness,
for from "divine darkness" had sprung the light of creation,
and in divine darkness lay the almighty unmanifested God, inaccessible
to mortal apprehension, definable only through negatives. The old day /
night antithesis as integrity against covertness is reversed by Chapman
into one of triviality against profundity: "Day of deepe students,
most contentfull night . . . / Mens' faces glitter, and their hearts are
black, / But thou . . . /Art black in face, and glitter'st in thy heart."
But this mystical topos of noetic night contained multiplying political
ramifications. In Frances Yates' opinion, Chapman's poem itself had been
written in response to the mounting reaction against occult researches
-- hence the defensive preface against "the viperous head of benumming
ignorance" and "killing censures" -- the reaction represented
in England by Marlowe's Faustus. It may be that in Jacobean and
Caroline England the "inspired night" theme was forced to go
underground: Yates, in The Occult Philosophy in the Age of Elizabeth
argues that James I classed Agrippa with devils and evil conjurors, disapproved
of Dee, and probably saw Inspired Melancholy as damnable.[43]
Medically, moreover, Saturnians (according to Overbury) were malcontents.
Political radicals, too, moved in the current of Hermeticism, Familists
and Behmenists especially. The rescidivist Everard translated Hermes. And
in the Jacobean climate astrology was ipso facto suspect. The statutes
of the new Savilian Chair in Astronomy at Oxford, endowed in 1619, had
explicitly forbidden study of astrology; and the Laudian Code of 1636 ensured
the continuance of the medieval pattern of studies at Oxford.[44]
From 1612, with the death of Prince Henry, the occult was without support
at court. Casaubon's critique of the Hermetica as a fake was dedicated
in its English translation to James, in 1614.[45]

In light of all this, one may, I think, perceive in night verse a pattern
of polarity, between "high" and "low" nocturnes. In
contrast to the Sacred Night with its web of impolitic connotations, Cavalier
poets trivialised it. They invoked the fairy-topos and night revels, or
they hymned the jewelled landscapes of day. Luminalia, for instance
(written in 1638 to celebrate the confirmation of royal absolutism in the
ship-Money case) seems almost an exultant retort to the fervid nonsense
of Chapman and his cabalist underworld. It overrules any religious or inspirational
properties to night, which signifies only sleep:

The studious that consume their brains and sight
In search where doubtful knowledge lies
Grow weary of their fruitless use of light,
And with my shades do ease their eyes. (83-86)

(Contrast Chapman's "Day of deepe students" in the "deepe
search of knowledge.") Defending herself against "the old mistaking
sages" (92) who loathed her, Night in Luminalia argues rather
the importance of sleep as essential to success: merchant and mariner,
student and statesman, all need sleep to "profit" by their "toils"
(79-98). And here the regal masque furthers its polemical politicisation
of night. Sleep-bearing night had been articulated from at least the 1590s
in loosely oppositional, egalitarian terms as an anti-courtly motif: "O
Night" runs Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas, "thou pullest
the proud Mask away / . . . No difference night makes between the Peasant
and the Prince, / . . . For night's black Mantle covers all alike."
Exposing the common humanity of all classes, night, writes Du Bartas, bestows
luxurious repose on criminal and bargeman, mower and smith just as on kings.
More so indeed, echoed some writers, for the peasant with his quiet conscience
"all night / Sleep in Elysium": "Sweet rest enrings / The
tired body of the swarty clown" and not "the beds of kings."[46]Luminalia's figures retort to Night however that rest is inappropriate
at the court, whose people "know their own estate," and are "free
from sufferings and decay" to dedicate themselves "to raise new
joys and keep the old alive" (138, 125, 129). In this court "all
to triumphs are addressed"; their dignity lies, haughtily, in that
they both "know" and "deserve felicity" (120, 141).
To demotic Night, bearer of mundane rest, Luminalia thus counterposes
courtly celebration of exclusive status: her denizens transcend the rhythms
of quotidian labour, freed to revel all night through. "What is the
use of silence here? / Thou sees'st, great empress, every eye / Doth watch
for measures" (130-33) gloat the privileged, poised for night dancing.
Comus (122-24, 128) similarly asks "What has night to do with
sleep? / Night hath better sweets to prove. / Venus now wakes, and wakens
Love / . . . Hail, goddess of nocturnal sport": an invitation pointedly
rebuffed by the puritan poet's mystically contemplative Lady. London gallants
regularly celebrated their wealth in nocturnal carousal ("Let's laugh
now, and the pressed grape drink / Till the drowsy Day-star wink"
runs Vaughan's apprentice Anacreontic), and indeed nocturnes were sometimes
painted across the ceilings of taverns.[47]

Luminalia's darkness, like Oberon and the earlier Masque
of Blackness, luxuriously spills forth "fantastic creatures of
the night." Ben Jonson's verse likewise draws on fairyland, for a
delicate literary disquiet.

The fairy beam upon you,
The stars to glisten on you:
A moon of light,
In the noon of night,
Till the fire-drake hath o'ergone you.

Herrick expands this in his "Night-piece," where he awaits
love-making with his mistress:

Her Eyes the Glow-worme lend thee,
The Shooting Starres attend thee;
And the Elves also,
Whose little eyes glow,
Like the sparks of fire, befriend thee.[48]

The contrast with the Puritan George Wither's night, "friend"
to "Meditation . . . and seriou'st Muses" is suggestively sharp.
Such nocturnalism is at one level elegantly secular: the mythology of midnight
may no longer unseat the urbane scalp. But there may be more here than
primitive reflexes transvalued into romancey cultivation. Fairy-nocturne,
I think, exerts a discreet polemical allegiance to Royalist values, like
the panegyrics of country life alongside which it flows so smoothly.

I sing of May-poles, Hock-carts, Wassails, Wakes,
Of Bridegrooms, Brides, and of their Bridall-cakes.
I write of Youth, of Love, and have Accesse
By these, to sing of cleanly-Wantonness . . . I write of Groves, of Twilights, and I sing
The court of Mab, and of the Fairie-King.[49]
[italics mine]

Protestantism taught that both ghosts and faeries were Catholic fictions
deployed to defraud; and such conviction, suggests Keith Thomas, was in
the sixteenth century "a shibboleth which distinguished Protestant
from Catholic almost as effectively as belief in the Mass or Papal Supremacy."
At the same time, fairies were no longer conceived as malevolent but were
coming to be seen as benign in character: to the point, amazingly, where
tricksters in London were actually able (rather as in Jonson's Alchemist)
to cozen money from victims under pretence of investing it with caring
faeries. (Faeries, I'd suggest, were perhaps here inheriting the protective
"Mariological" reflexes of the Middle Ages.) As faeries became
for the majority however more a matter of mythology than living beliefs,
Shakespeare's Dream introduced into literature one strand of folklore,
the tiny, flower-loving and benevolent version with which we are today
familiar, and was imitated here by Herrick and Drayton. Given these demystifying
developments, Shakespeare's aestheticised fairylore, I would argue, came
to function at the increasingly Anglo-Catholic courts of James and Charles
as a kind of discourse of nostalgia, political and religious. Fairylore
carried clear affinities with an older, more secret, magical and ritualistic
world of the past, when supernatural beliefs helped sustain what was at
court a keenly regretted conservative society: one so different from the
aggressive rationalism of the Reformation with its abolition of Purgatory
and scoffing at ghosts, its puritan campaigning against traditional rural
sports and its bourgeois dismissal from the traditional calendar of "lucky"
and "evil" days. Fairy religion, writes Herrick, is "part
pagan, part papistical"; and he fantasises a "Faery Temple"
replete with "masse-priests," "copes" and "cloyster-monks."
As a kind of "natural" arcana, the fairy kingdom and its nocturnal
rites shared much with the tonality of a court that grounded its prerogatives
in a mystic ideology of sustaining supernatural relations. The tonality
seems to overlap with that of court masque, a "theatre of mysteries"[50]
dealing in wonder and magic; and the intense aestheticism has perhaps affinities
with the Laudian "beauty of holiness." Cavalier fairy-nocturne,
then, at a level of levity and creative display, offered the reassurance
of an enchanted conservatism, Catholic in dignity and wrought with courtly
preciosity. It nurtured a longing, among both urban sophisticates and courtly
poets, for emotional and religious roots in danger of being lost.

Like masque, its delights dovetailed into an amorous theme; and Night's
erotic associations need little gloss. Darkness has long summoned the post-coital
smirk. "The glade nyght ys worth an hevy morowe" cried Chaucer.
His Wife of Bath had counted it comically naive when her husband accepted
that her frequent "walkynge out by nyghte" was not for adulterous
rendezvous; and the first recorded use of the coinage "noctivagant"
-- going by night -- expresses a splendidly Puritanical ornithology: "The
lustful sparrows, noctivagant adulterers, sit chirping about our houses."
"Dark night is Cupid's day" was an Elizabethan proverb, dated
by Tilley to 1595. "Tis a fit night to run away with another man's
wife," remarks a character in Fletcher. "Ha," cries Falstaff,
"twas a merry night. And is Jane Nightwork still alive?" By the
1630s, Cavalier amorous nocturne was so firmly established as both courtly
occupation and poetic vogue that the prince of gallants, Sir John Suckling,
could mock it from deep within the convention. In his play Aglaura,
featuring nocturnal scenes of illicit love, dread deeds and miraculous
reversal, and probably borrowing Luminalia's scenery, a courtier
asked for a song cries out: "A vengeance take this love . . . I have
got such a cold with rising and walking in my shirt a nights, that a Bittorne
whooping in a reed is better musike."[51]

Other Jacobean and Caroline night treatments disclose only the orthodox
horrors (as in Webster's dramas), or the orthodox awe in the wonder of
the constellations (as in Herbert's "Star"). The exception, of
course, was Il Penseroso: written by Milton as an Hermeticist, and
in the very period when his disaffection with Anglicanism grew to the point
of definite refusal to "subscribe slave" as a minister. Is it
then perhaps less than fanciful to see in Comus' attacks on the
nocturnal amorousness of literary supernaturals, a poetic reproach of the
Cavalier genre of "low" nocturnes?

With the advent of the Commonwealth, its flood of ideas and relaxation
of censorship, "Inspired Night" became permissible once again.
Vaughan's "Night" was penned in this period. The sense of night's
sanctity during these years is of course also accentuated by the suppression
of the Anglican service (giving rise, at the least, to the stanza in Vaughan's
"Night"), and by the violence of day, which resuscitates the
Elizabethan mystic antithesis between mis-spent day and the profound sanctuary
of night:

Dear night! this world's defeat;
The stop to busy fools; care's check and curb;
The day of Spirits; my soul's calm retreat
Which none disturb![52]

And with the Restoration, John Norris recapitulates in his "Hymn
to Darkness" all the major Neoplatonic tributes to night first sung
in English by Chapman a full century before: the dazzling darkness paradox;
inspirational melancholy; religious awe and fear; darkness as the original
"universal wombe"; and night as spiritual refuge from the evils
of day.

Milton

Milton's poetic relations with the varied currents of this new sensibility
are characteristic: whilst gathering its full range into his innovative
genius, and decisively expanding the form, his aesthetic enthusiasm is
from the outset commanded by high political and moral discrimination.

Night's negative associations teem unbanished: Comus, its protagonists
strayed in a midnight rife with occult vitalities, thrills to a five-line
catalogue of "evil things that walk by night," "blue-meagre
hag" and "stubborn unlaid ghost," goblins and swart fairy
(432-37). In Paradise Lost Satan, gliding in night vapour, is frequently
associated with night and three times with midnight: "By night he
fled, and at midnight returned." Book five echoes the old Latin Breviary,
wherein returning light dispels the evil gathered under fall of dark.[53]

Yet the aesthetic enthusiasm for night is a conquering enchantment,
much as the Lady's pure lyric out-raptures Comus' primitive bawdy.
Milton pens one of the earliest colourific sunsets in the language, whose
array of clouds "reflected purple and gold" (4.596) accords with
Edward Norgate's advice to painters in Miniatura (second edition
1649) that "reddish and purple clouds" help render sunset.[54]
Night skies dazzle the Miltonic imagination repeatedly, whether
as the light of constellations, that blazing highway to God's house, "whose
dust is gold / And pavement stars," wherein the Milky Way "as
a circling zone thou seest / Powdered with stars"; or as the transfiguring
flood of moonlight spilled upon black:

there does a sable cloud
Turn forth her silver lining on the night,
And casts a gleam over this tufted grove . . .
Unmuffle ye faint stars, and thou fair moon
That wont'st to love the traveller's benison
Stoop thy pale visage through an amber cloud
And disinherit Chaos, that reigns here
In double night of darkness and of shades.[55]

"Swift as the sparkle of a glancing star" shoots the masque's
Attendant Spirit (80); and Eve, overheard by Satan, lists "walk by
moon / Or glittering starlight" among the sweetnesses of life in Eden
(4.655-56). From Shakespeare he pirates the neologism "sheen,"
so that his Cupid, starlike, while Adonis slumbers, sits "far above
in spangled sheen."[56]Il Penseroso,
of course, establishes a holy noctivagant aesthetic at the heart of its
poetic ideal: elaborating the walk by moon and nightingale into strolling
through shadowy oak woods, and pacing quiet ground above a wide tidal shore,
before entering the tower to "outwatch the Bear." The "black
air," gloom and damps of night, Milton specifies, were absent from
Eden, existing today as an unnatural postlapsarian distortion (10.846-50).
Adam and Eve pause before bed to "adore" the night sky, responding
without fear and with peaceful wonder to "This glorious sight"
(4.721, 657). Eve's "grateful evening mild" (647), echoing the
ancient motif of bodily respite, deepens this scene's creation of a vespertinal
luxury and ease.

Just as Il Penseroso's nightingale "shuns the noise of
folly" to sing her "even-song," "most musical"
(61-64), Milton almost programmatically "takes back the night"
from profanity of revel for the deeper joy of a sacred harmonics. Night
he associates with song: but with a richer melody than troubadour or Cavalier
could muster.

How sweetly did they float upon the wings
Of silence, through the empty-vaulted night
At every fall smoothing the raven down
Of darkness till it smiled . . .
. . . Such a sacred, and home-felt delight,
Such sober certainty of waking bliss
I never heard till now. (248-51, 261-63)

If Comus constitutes "a masque against masking," as
John Carey has shrewdly shown,[57] its Lady repudiating
masque-like revels along with the Comus who proffers and praises them (738-47),
then likewise the Lady's indictment of "wanton dance" and "late
wassailers" (175, 178), together with her counterposed sweeter song,
"resounding grace to all heaven's harmonies" (242) comprise a
reproach, I suggest, not simply to the aristocracy's night revels but to
companion Cavalier "low nocturne." For Paradise Lost will
reconstruct the same antithesis of courtly nocturne against a truer night
music: fulfilment lies not

. . . in court amours,
Mixed dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball,
Or serenade, which the starved lover sings
To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain.
These lulled by nightingales embracing slept . . . (767-71)

That Satan sings a traditional Serenade to beckon Eve from Adam's side
(at 5.38-43) is again reproach of a profane tradition of nightsong: to
which the epic again counterposes a sacred song of night. For Adam reminds
Eve how often they have heard "Celestial voices to the midnight air,
/ Sole, or responsive to each other's note / Singing their great Creator,"
and remarks to Raphael on his delight when "Cherubic songs by night
from neighbouring hills / Aerial music send" (4.680-88; 5.547-48).

It is, I conclude by suggesting, precisely the absence of such religious
telos that Milton deplored and contested in the new nocturnal vogue. Night,
for all its wheeling stellar grandeur, its ravishing silences and song,
is for religious contemplation (as the epic's extended discussions on astronomy
make pointed), or more usually, for sleep: as the interval in rhythms of
righteous action. The essential contrast between Milton's description of
night's onset ("Now came still evening on") and Eve's to Adam
("Sweet the coming on / Of grateful evening mild") in book four,[58]
lies in the latter's blankly pleasant landscape as against the
Miltonic sense of resistless purposeful activism. Hesperus "rides,"
leading a vanguard "starry host," until the moon "Rising
in clouded majesty, at length / Apparent Queen unveiled her peerless light,
/ And oe'r the dark her silver mantle threw." The spectacle reminds
Adam of the need for sleep that they may buckle to hard graft on the morrow;
and the stars he exposits as edifying exemplars of an unflagging work-ethic.
"Those have their course to finish, round the earth, / By morrow evening,"
he enthuses, warming to his theme across twenty lines (4.661-80). It is
accordingly the proffering of a contextless beauty, the displacement of
active religious perception by an aesthetics of mere mood, that makes Satan's
fashionable nocturne satanic. His first temptation to Eve is precisely
to walk by night and enjoy its enchantments without contextualising gratitude
and awe.

Why sleep'st thou Eve? Now is the pleasant time,
The cool, the silent, save where silence yields
To the night-warbling bird, that now awake
Tunes sweetest his love-laboured song; now reigns
Full-orbed the moon, and with more pleasing light
Shadowy sets off the face of things; in vain,
If none regard. (5.38-43)

Landscape description in this period is in transition, from traditional
paysage moralisé to pictorialism, and verse such as Saint-Amant's
La Solitude, for instance, anticipates Romantic "mood-music"
in the age of the emblem book: a passive, sensuous, deliquescent perception
of nature ousting the hieroglyphic imagination.[59] It
may be indeed that the evocative luxury of night, its stealing of firm
daylight clarities in glimmering suggestion (one remembers Gossaert's dissolving
of diurnal substance) explains much of the popularity of the seventeenth
century moonlight walk. If Satan, as Howard Schultz[60]
has pointed out, is singing an immoral Cavalier serenade, flattering
Eve blasphemously, and beckoning her with the conventional venite,
there may be, I suggest, a further possible dimension of the diabolic here,
in that profane preference for concealing shades over the clear forms of
God's creation. He urges Eve to a state in which natural phenomena dissolve
the thoughtful mind, the grateful emblematic rationality, fill up the consciousness
with sensuous luxury, and eclipse the Creator who lies beyond them. He
tempts her, in Herbert's words, to "rest in Nature, not the God of
Nature."[61] Satan, then, is a Romantic,
and would write poetry like Thomas Warton, of self-sufficient sensory glut.
He offers an impious grandiloquence of the sense as against the truly devotional
perception of earth whose hallmark is reason.

The preference of course, is typical of this "anti-teleological"
Satan, who denies his creation by God and inhabits a universe he refuses
to revere (5.856-66); yet it typifies, too, that merely possessive, competitive
relation to beauty exercised by the Cavalier art connoisseur, who collects
landscape and moonlight paintings only for ornament and wealth. Despising
such values, Milton has only the fallen Adam conceive Eve in the
choice, aesthetic terms of the connoisseur ("I see thou art exact
of taste / And elegant"), and notes that the Fiend, eyeing from the
Tree of Life "Nature's whole wealth," refused regenerative contemplation
of the scene "but only used for prospect."[62]

In conclusion, we have seen that classical and medieval traditions
predominantly identified night with the negative: metaphorically, with
the generalities of evil, death and suffering, and concretely, with illicit
sexuality, demonology and crime. In contrast, however, and in deep subordination,
were the occasional positive motifs: the nocturnal peace of respite, and
the visionary religious night whose silence and providential starscapes
induce wonder, contemplation, even theophany. Renaissance England's fashionable
new cult of the night developed by expanding the religious tradition along
"inspired night" variations, and by revaluing the old themes
of rogue love and baleful supernaturalism within a comfortably adjusted
metropolitan topos of jubilant amorous revel and archaic fairy fancy. Disposed,
too, toward novel descriptive empiricism, it sought articulation of a delicate
nocturnal aesthetic, a "romancey" mood-music of deep glooms and
mystical glitter. Milton, above all, is enamoured of a night that repudiates
amour; and sings of its hours as those of a higher natural or sacred song,
deriding the discords of cavalier nocturne. He urges perception of a sacramental
starscape, a noetic night of wonder and beneficence, which shames as "satanic"
a mere spectatorship of sensuous mood and painterly bravura.

Thus at their shady lodge arrived, both stood,
Both turned, and under open sky adored
The God that made both sky, air, earth and heaven.
Which they beheld, the moon's resplendent globe
And starry pole: Thou also madest the night,
Maker omnipotent . . . (Paradise Lost 4.720-25)

15. Chaucer (Troilus and Criseyde 3.1429-42,
1450-56); Donne ("The Sun Rising"). On medieval amorous night-visits,
a European rather than English vogue, Baskerville's "English songs
on the night visit."

16. Dodds (Pagan and Christian in an Age
of Anxiety (37).

17. Monasticism and moonlight: Leclercq (The
Love of Learning and the Desire for God 131); on mighty starscapes
in Senecan tragedy, for instance, Herington (185-87); Julian (Orations
5.130 C-D).

25.The Rape of Lucrece (167); night
watch: see Thomas (Religion and the Decline of Magic 702); Benandanti,
see Ginzburg (The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults).

26. Marston and Ascham: see notes to Shakespeare
(Macbeth, ed. Muir) for 2.1.49-50 and 3.2.53. Nashe (The Terrors
of the Night 249, 2O9).

27.Il Penseroso, it may be objected,
is not primarily a nocturne: but if it cannot be wholly conformed to any
genre, in its proceedings sui generis "Night" as opposed
to the "Day" of L'Allegro is clearly its dominant setting.
Elaborating and innovating nocturnal actions and motifs for two-thirds
of the poem, it will prove indeed the locus classicus of nocturnal properties
and inspiration for two succeeding centuries.

48. Jonson ("The Fairy beam upon you"
1-5 ["The Gypsies Metamorphosed" 325]); Herrick ("The night-piece,
to Julia" 1-5). I suspect that these two poets are indebted to Shakespeare's
Song in Cymbeline, third stanza (4.2.277-82), for mood and imagery
here.

50. On Protestants, ghosts and faeries see
Thomas (Religion and the Decline of Magic 701-11, 725, 729); fairy-tricksters
(Thomas 732-34); on Shakespeare's fairy revolution see Briggs (The Anatomy
of Puck 45-47); Herrick ("The Fairy Temple" 25, 103, 98,
107); "theatre of mysteries" is a phrase of Graham Parry on the
masque (The Golden Age Restored 42).